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Annual Highlights – 2011

It was a good year for the vibrancy of the Savage Minds community. There were plenty of interesting posts to comment on and issues to debate. Here in our annual year-in-review I’ll point you towards some of our greatest hits, maybe there’s one you missed! The top ten posts of the year are highlighted in boldface.

It was just a year ago we had “science” to kick around. Kerim likes that science is willing to ask tough questions, but argued that it needed the humanities to make it better. This linked up to a a discussion on The Greater Humanities, a conference paper from Jim Clifford in which he imagines a new coalition of knowledge practices fit to weather the changing environments of the univerisites of the future.

It seems that in 2011 we had less to say about American foreign policy and the ongoing wars in Iraq in Afganistan. Perhaps the Human Terrain controversy become boring? Maybe our attentions were diverted to the street protests that swept the globe? Or possibly we just need Max Forte to kick us in the seat of the pants and start blogging again? At any rate this year the most viewed post on Savage Minds followed quickly on the heels of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, my own Codename: Geronimo (#1), a semiotic analysis of the U.S. military’s tangled history of using American Indians as symbols of martial prowess, either as friends or foes. It borrows heavily from a conference paper I wrote in ’05 titled “How the Mid-East was Won” (three years prior to, but not nearly as complete as Stephen Stilliman’s “The ‘Old West’ in the Middle East: U.S. Military Metaphors in Real and Imagined Indian Country” in American Anthropologist, V.110, #2), hence all the references to the Iraq war when examples from Afghanistan would have been more relevant.

I think I speak for all of us at Savage Minds in extending a hearty thank you to our readership. When writing these blog posts, you simply have no idea whether people will come away enlightened, think that you’re an idiot, or even bother to read it at all. The audience is part of the thrill, the mystery, and the frustration of writing for any venue. In closing I would like to extend an invitation to all our readers to join in on discussions in the comments sections of our future posts. Blogging, like so many other kinds of discourses, benefits from more voices rather than less. Don’t be shy! Speak your mind and click submit. Hell, start your own blog and send us the link. See you in the new year, anthropologists.

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Matt Thompson is adjunct assistant professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Old Dominion University and a student in the School of Information Science at the University of Tennessee. He was once cast as a soldier in Andrew Jackson's army in a theatrical production on an Indian reservation.